New name and new challenges

As we start the beginning of our FY15, I want to thank all our customers, partners, staff, and community members for their contributions this past year. I’m proud of what we collectively achieved even as we drove significant changes in our business and organization. It’s energizing to feel the momentum and enthusiasm building around MariaDB.

So, as my first act for FY15, I am excited to announce that today SkySQL will change its name to MariaDB Corporation. This name change will more closely associate the MariaDB open-source database with the company behind it. You may have already noticed that we moved our corporate website from skysql.com to mariadb.com.

As the adoption of MariaDB grows within the MySQL community, so does its acceptance in the enterprise space. Having started as an exciting open source project, MariaDB has since been embraced by millions of enthusiastic developers and some of the world’s largest open source organizations including Red Hat, Wikipedia, and IBM. With the technical and financial support of this fantastic ecosystem, MariaDB has evolved into a high performance, secure, reliable, and fully supported portfolio of enterprise products. By aligning our company more closely with the technology we hope to drive even further adoption in the enterprise space whilst keeping true to the open source heritage.

However, we recognise that many MariaDB users continue to use MySQL. In addition, there is a large base of MySQL users that have yet to try MariaDB. We therefore remain committed to supporting customers in their use of both technologies.

Please be assured that we remain passionately committed to innovation through Open Source software. Therefore we will continue to sponsor and support the MariaDB Foundation – the hub of the open, independent, and dynamic community that drives the adoption of MariaDB. We are proud to be part of the MariaDB Foundation and greatly value the collaborative relationship between the foundation, our company, and the larger MariaDB community.

Looking to the future

MariaDB Corporation has a very busy FY15 planned with exciting new programmes to launch and grow.

Recently we took the step into the embedded market by providing subscription services which help OEM/ISV’s leverage MariaDB Enterprise to deliver faster, state-of-the-art functionality to their own clients. See the overview of the OEM/ISV subscription for more information.

We’re very excited about our partnerships with industry leaders IBM, Red Hat and SUSE. All have recognised the momentum building around MariaDB and are incorporating it into their enterprise architectures. We can already see implications of this as other significant hardware, software, and cloud providers embrace MariaDB. In collaboration with its partners, MariaDB Corporation will in the coming year release a number of new capabilities that will further enrich the user experience and reinforce its position in the broader open source community.